Music Piracy Is Back, Baby

“You wouldn’t steal a automobile. You wouldn’t steal a purse,” stated that notorious 2000s anti-piracy commercial from the Movement Image Affiliation. “Piracy is stealing.”

However would you pirate a tune? Final 12 months, over 17 billion visits have been made to music piracy web sites all over the world, first reported by Wired. Music piracy is on the rise, with visits to those web sites rising by 13% from 2022. We’ve come a great distance since Napster, however individuals are as soon as once more utilizing the web to illegally obtain their favourite songs in a significant approach. And this time, they’re utilizing YouTube.

Muso, a analysis agency that research piracy, concluded that the excessive costs of streaming providers like Spotify and Apple Music are pushing folks again in direction of unlawful downloads. Spotify raised its prices by one dollar final 12 months to $10.99 a month, the identical worth as Apple Music. As an alternative of coughing up $132 a 12 months, extra shoppers are utilizing web sites that rip audio straight out of YouTube movies, and convert them into downloadable MP3 or .wav recordsdata.

Roughly 40% of the music piracy Muso tracked was from these “YouTube-to-MP3” websites. The unique YouTube-to-MP3 site died from a record label lawsuit, however different copycats do the identical factor. A easy Google search yields dozens of blue hyperlinks to those websites, and so they’re, by far, the most important type of audio piracy on the web.

It’s handy that Google, which owns YouTube, directs customers straight to those piracy websites, which in flip generate billions of visits to YouTube. Google has hardline policies against copyright infringement in its phrases of service however appears to let these music piracy websites scootch by.

“It’s critically necessary to YouTube that creators and artists are paid appropriately for his or her content material,” stated YouTube spokesperson Jack Malone in an announcement to Gizmodo on Thursday.

Malone notes that YouTube takes motion towards these audio-ripping providers when it’s notified about them. It appears nobody notified YouTube concerning the 10 blue hyperlinks that seem on the primary web page of Google while you search “YouTube to MP3.”

The times when folks would pay for an album are lengthy gone, nonetheless, Napster’s legacy lives on. Over 20 years in the past, the web was revolutionized via free music file sharing. In the present day, Napster’s legacy lives on via web sites that rip YouTube’s audio.